Stretching my non-fiction muscles: Coming Home

Black Sheep is crowded with customers seeking their coffee fix in the lull of a Midwest winter. Only the snow freezing firmly to the streets and lawns and clinging at the branches of deciduous trees keeps the cold in, a backwards incubator is the southeast corner of South Dakota and it’s only December. The New Year creeps ever closer, bringing with it two new waves of snow and ice. The Working Class packs trunks full of blankets and funnels of extra gas, the Domestic hoard bulked canned goods and watch traffic from frosted windowpanes in hand-scrubbed kitchens that gleam new plastics, fresh tiles.

Does it feel good going back each night to the old farmhouse of youth? I made a tent of sheets in the basement, dozing on stacked sleeping bags and unearthed my baby blanket. She is all white, sewn petal patterns, worn where I clutched the material between baby thumb and index finger and rubbed, hard, like sucking my thumb, it was comforting. My aunt called it ‘withering’. I still dream of the feeling. The corners are worn the most, the biggest petals. Drinking the nostalgia as I rub each section back and forth between my fingers, one after the other and finally beat the anxiety in sleep.

I’ve resurrected these few childhood comforts, imagining soft hands rubbing my back as I fall asleep in the safety of a warm twin bed, surrounded by stuffed bears and dogs and donkeys. I sing myself to sleep with “Hush Little Baby” and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”; my parents’ lullabies. Is this what all lost children do when they finally come home? I imagine so. It makes me feel less of a failure.

I stumbled along the path of independence, succumbing to harmful thoughts and bad habits. Unlike my wills and desires, my mind was not ready to learn the hard way. I threw myself into unknown territories, expecting to ‘wing it’ and when I finally stopped to evaluate the journey, I found my body, half-alive, running circles around tree trunks to keep warm, head above ground, feet in the leaves. But I was hovering, pitching in the cross-winds of lake-side cities. It was time to go inland, to fields of half-cornstalks and bare black earth where the soybean plants had grown. South Dakota in the wintertime has never been known to cure depression.

I made it just in time for the first real snow, the sticky kind that stands up to a noontime sun. I sled in the darkness of 6PM with my youngest and only sister. The cold has never affected her; she is a true Scandinavian. And what am I? A toe-headed kid turned brunette half-adult, growing. Fuck up, learn, coast and do it all over again. This is the cycle. Those who do not realize it get hung up on the fuck up, skip the learning, and pray for a forever coast. I treasure my fuck ups, mark them with a heated blade and three, four, five blisters across my lower leg; like the doorway of your parents’ home, with pencil lines preceded with dates and names, archiving each inch you gained. I always lost that game; praying for growing pains, I grew steady.